I’ve stopped and started taking ADHD medication four times. The first time I started was nearly 15 years ago. The fourth time I started was yesterday.
Excerpt:
Now that he had the facts, now that we had interviewed so many experts, now that he and Janis had done a great deal of reading, Patrick said that he was looking forward to trying medication.
He said he was looking forward to experiencing that calm that other people talk about, but that he had never known. I smiled and nodded. Been there done that. ‘Good answer,’ I thought.
But for Ava [who doesn’t have ADHD], Patrick’s answer was a bolt of lightning. A revelation.
She was stunned! “Patrick has never experienced the kind of calm that she had regular access to? How is that possible? What is that like?”
“If you have ADHD, the stronger message isn’t that you were late for work last time, but the desire to play a video game for a couple of minutes or phone a friend about going out on the weekend right now. And you are late for work — again. You keep doing the same things over and over because past experiences are being cut off by what is in your focus at the moment.”
“As I’ve said, people with ADHD often forget things that aren’t in their focus, so these anxious thoughts are an attempt to keep these items (cars) in the intersection, so that the person doesn’t forget about them. Holding many things in your mind creates a lot of tension, a traffic jam of sorts. Whenever too many things — thoughts or emotions — try to pass through the intersection at the same time, you’re apt to feel anxiously overwhelmed and shut down. For instance, when trying to clean a cluttered room, with many items demanding your attention and none of them sticking out as more important than the other, you don’t know what to do first, so you don’t do anything.”
Note, I read this and my POST ON TUMBLR thought took over and I completely abandoned my sentence writing about how people with ADHD can’t focus on sequenced thoughts in their mind and only can regulate a singular thought at once (aka no regulation occurring lmao).
The standard conception of the disorder is based on studies of "hyperactive young white boys." For females, it comes on later, and has different symptoms.
ADHD does not look the same in boys and girls. Women with the disorder tend to be less hyperactive and impulsive, more disorganized, scattered, forgetful, and introverted. “They’ve alternately been anxious or depressed for years,” Littman says. “It’s this sense of not being able to hold everything together.”
Further, while a decrease in symptoms at puberty is common for boys, the opposite is true for girls, whose symptoms intensify as estrogen increases in their system, thus complicating the general perception that ADHD is resolved by puberty. One of the criteria for ADHD long held by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, published by the American Psychiatric Association, is that symptoms appear by age 7. While this age is expected to change to 12 in the new DSM-V, symptoms may not emerge until college for many girls, when the organizing structure of home life—parents, rules, chores, and daily, mandatory school—is eliminated, and as estrogen levels increase. “Symptoms may still be present in these girls early on,” says Dr. Pat Quinn, cofounder of The National Center for Girls and Women with ADHD. “They just might not affect functioning until a girl is older.”
Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD) manifests in many small, sometimes maddening ways. Itchy tags may be unbearable. Loud music intolerable. Perfume simply sickening. Whatever the specific symptoms, …
Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD) disrupts how the central nervous system takes in, organizes, and uses the messages that we get through our body’s receptors for everyday functioning. We take in sensory information through our eyes, ears, muscles, joints, skin and inner ears, and we use those sensations – we integrate them, modulate them, analyze them and interpret them for immediate and appropriate everyday functioning.
For example, you hear a truck rumbling down the road as you’re standing poised to cross the street, and that rumbling of the truck tells you, “Jump back.” You don’t think about it, you just react instinctively, if all is going well. But sometimes with SPD, that processing falters. For people with SPD, sensory stimuli from our own bodies and from our environment can cause signals to misfire — and problems in movement, emotions, relationships, tension and adaptations to the signals that we’re constantly receiving.
[...]
Temple Grandin says that all people on the autism spectrum have SPD and sensory challenges.
ADHD and SPD have fidgetiness and inattention in common. The big difference: If you take away the sensory overload of an itchy tag or a humming florescent bulb, the behavior changes for a person with SPD. For a person with ADHD, it does not.
SPD may occur on its own, or alongside ADHD and/or autism.
For people with ADHD or ADD, Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria can mean extreme emotional sensitivity and emotional pain — and it may imitate mood disorders with suicidal ideation and manifest as insta…
Excerpt:
Rejection sensitivity is part of ADHD. It’s neurologic and genetic. Early childhood trauma makes anything worse, but it does not cause RSD. Often, patients are comforted just to know there is a name for this feeling. It makes a difference knowing what it is, that they are not alone, and that almost 100% of people with ADHD experience rejection sensitivity. After hearing this diagnosis, they know it’s not their fault, that they are not damaged.
Psychotherapy does not particularly help patients with RSD because the emotions hit suddenly and completely overwhelm the mind and senses. It takes a while for someone with RSD to get back on his feet after an episode.
There are two possible medication solutions for RSD.
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[With medication] about one in three people feel relief from RSD. When that happens, the change is life altering. The treatment can make an even greater difference than a stimulant does to treat ADHD.
“Challenges with processing emotions start in the brain itself. Sometimes the working memory impairments of ADHD allow a momentary emotion to become too strong, flooding the brain with one in…
ADHD means that your brain has problems regulating attention - and emotions.
"It commonly occurs when ADHD and anxiety combine."
ADHD is sometimes viewed as just forgetting things and having a short attention span, but for some, it’s a serious neurological disorder that affects a lot more than just executive function. What a lot of people don’t know is the significant emotional toll it takes on the person that has it, the extent of which can lead to severe depression and anxiety, and even suicidal thoughts.
It’s 30 years since the condition was recognised. It is most often associated with children, but more and more grownups are now being diagnosed. Does this help?
Excerpt:
Dr Ashok Roy, head of the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ intellectual disability faculty, says the core symptoms are the same in men and women, but that “female patients’ inattention problems often are combined with daydreaming, whereas men have more hyperactivity and behavioural problems, which are more noticeable during childhood”. Roy has also observed that women with ADHD also tend to suffer from other disorders that can affect their mood and behaviour.
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Indeed, the most common story I hear from those I speak to with ADHD is that they were diagnosed with conditions such as depression and anxiety before they discovered they had it. This is something I can attest to. I stopped receiving treatment for ADHD in my teens. This was partly because I moved around so much but also because I was resistant to the label; I didn’t want to believe there was something wrong with me. In my early 20s, I sought treatment again only because my life was falling apart. I didn’t receive the support I felt I needed and was given antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication instead.
